Posted on 08/25/2005 3:04:51 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Bob Davidson is a scientist — a doctor, and for 28 years a nephrology professor at the University of Washington medical school.
He's also a devout Christian who believes we're here because of God. It was these twin devotions to science and religion that first attracted him to Seattle's Discovery Institute. That's the think tank that this summer has pushed "intelligent design" — a replacement theory for evolution — all the way to the lips of President Bush and into the national conversation.
Davidson says he was seeking a place where people "believe in a Creator and also believe in science.
"I thought it was refreshing," he says.
Not anymore. He's concluded the institute is an affront to both science and religion.
"When I joined I didn't think they were about bashing evolution. It's pseudo-science, at best ... What they're doing is instigating a conflict between science and religion."
I got Davidson's name off a list of 400 people with scientific degrees, provided by the Discovery Institute, who are said to doubt the "central tenets of Darwin's theory of evolution." Davidson, at 78 a UW professor emeritus, says he shouldn't be on the list because he believes "the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming."
He's only one scientist, one opinion in our ongoing debate about evolution and faith. But I bring you Davidson's views because I suspect he is a bellwether for the Discovery Institute and intelligent design, as more scientists learn about them. He was attracted to an institute that embraced both science and religion, yet he found its critique of existing science wrong and its new theory empty.
"I'm kind of embarrassed that I ever got involved with this," Davidson says.
He was shocked, he says, when he saw the Discovery Institute was calling evolution a "theory in crisis."
"It's laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution," he says. "There's always questions being asked about parts of the theory, as there are with any theory, but there's no real scientific controversy about it."
Davidson began to believe the institute is an "elaborate, clever marketing program" to tear down evolution for religious reasons. He read its writings on intelligent design — the notion that some of life is so complex it must have been designed — and found them lacking in scientific merit.
Then Davidson, who attends First Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, heard a sermon in which the pastor argued it's foolish to try to use science to understand God. Science is about measuring things, and God is immeasurable, the pastor said.
"It just clicked with me that this whole movement is wrongheaded on all counts," Davidson said. "It's a misuse of science, and a misuse of religion. "Why can't we just keep the two separate?"
That's a good question, especially coming from someone who believes strongly in both.
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One Nation, Under the Designer. The true goals of the ID movement.
Discovery Institute's "Wedge Project". Replacing science with theism.
The Wedge at Work. The Discovery Institute's war against reason.
Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D. Jonathan Wells, Moonie, and Senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father [Rev. Sun Myung Moon] chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.
good catch.
Science is about understanding the nature of reality.
Religion is about understanding the nature of reality.
How can these two disciplines be kept separate?
"It's laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution," he says. "There's always questions being asked about parts of the theory, as there are with any theory, but there's no real scientific controversy about it."
Millions of experiements - what experiments exactly "support evolution"?
There is no conflict between evolution and creationism unless one tries to contend that the creation occurred only 4,000 years ago, as some do.
Just about every test done in biology and paleontology -- how many would you like me to list?
Hint: "Experiments" are not just things done in laboratories with test tubes.
Well, there are "old earth" creationists who also find conflicts between creationism and evolution -- it depends on how literally they interpret certain parts of Genesis.
basis and methodology.
science's basis is empirical evidence.
science's methodology depends upon repeatability, observation, prediction, testing, and refinement based upon new data.
Religion's (as opposed to faith's) basis is dogma.
Religion's methodology is rote-learning of dogma.
there is no common ground.
I've spent a lot of time going over the Discovery Institute's material, and I concur with the article 100%.
The pastors statement is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read...You can certainly use science to physically discover God. IMO science proves God over and over again by pointing to things only an intelligent designer could make.
And before someone gets the wrong idea as usual, I'll point out that contrary to common misconceptions:
1. The "repeatability" in science is *NOT* a requirement that the actual process being studied can be "repeated". A scientist is not required to actually reproduce the formation of the Hawaiian Islands in order to scientifically investigate how they formed. Instead, the repeatability requirement in science means that the *tests*, the *experiments*, and the *observations* need to be repeatable. It has to be possible for other people to verify your findings by repeating your procedures and/or re-examining your evidence.
2. Likewise, the "observation" requirement is *NOT* a requirement that someone has to actually watch the process being studied. No one has to be able to watch the Hawaiian Islands originally form. Instead, science requires that there has to be observable *evidence*, observable *tests*, observable findings. In short, you have to be able to do a "reality-check" and *look* at the real world in order to compare it against your belief/hypothesis/explanation.
3. The "prediction" part doesn't mean that you're required to be able to predict the future of the process being examined (e.g. what's going to happen to the Hawaiian Islands next, geologically), it means that your theory has to be able to predict what the specific results will be if you perform various kinds of tests or experiments, or if you go looking for specific kinds of evidence. In the example I've been using, a plate-tectonic theory of the formation of the Hawaiian Islands would predict that if you look at certain places in, under, and around the Hawaiian Islands, you should find certain kinds of rocks with certain kinds of properties, since plate-tectonic processes would have necessarily caused such results, and so on. Then you go and *look* (observation again) to see whether the rocks actually *fit* the predictions of the theory. If so, it's confirming evidence for the theory. If not, it's evidence of falsification of the theory, and you go back to the drawing board.
So contray to common creationist misconceptions, evolutionary biology is not "unscientific" if a) no one observed life evolving 100 million years ago, b) no one can repeat the re-evolution of dinosaurs, and c) no one can predict exactly where evolution will go in the future. Those *aren't* the kinds of observation, repeatability, and prediction required by the scientific method. What *is* required, and what *has* been done countless times over the past 150 years, is observation of the evidence and processes of evolution, repeatability of the tests and data analyses confirming evolution, and predictions about what we should find (in DNA, in biochemistry, in the patterns of living things, etc.) if life has progressed via evolutionary processes. And so far, evolutionary biology has passed countless such validation tests with flying colors, and survived countless falsification tests.
What things might those be, and how have you ruled out the possibility that no other process than "design" (including processes no one has thought of yet) could possibly produce those things? How do you prove that negative?
It's one thing to claim evidence *of* design, but it's another thing entirely to say that one can conclude design because one has (somehow?) managed to rule out *all* other potential known and unknown alternatives, as you have done.
Because one is about metaphysics and the other is about epistemology.
Religious people object when scientists make atheistic metaphysical statements. Scientists object when religious people make faith-based epistemological statements about the physical universe. They're not equivalent, though: one's metaphysics doesn't impinge on one's ability to understand or solve real-world problems, while one's epistemology does.
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